


some halfhuman creature thing

by oxymoronic



Category: Trainspotting (1996)
Genre: Explicit Language, Homophobic Language, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M, Post-Canon, Racist Language, Sexual Content, T2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-16
Updated: 2017-02-16
Packaged: 2018-09-25 00:05:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9793682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oxymoronic/pseuds/oxymoronic
Summary: “Were you ever gonna tell me that you’re gay?” Mark asks, and Simon’s life, brief and joyless as it is, flashes before his fucking eyes.





	

**Author's Note:**

> less of a fic and more of a series of post-T2 scenes i wanted to write. huge cheers to jackmarlowe for the beta-read and the cheerleading as ever, you are FUCKIN FAB. please excuse my middle-class southern attempts to write anything resembling scottish.
> 
> P.S. the ratio of the word "the" and the word "fuck" in this fic is 1.6:1

The call comes early. Mark’s phone, shrill and unrepentant, makes Simon jolt and swear. Nothing like wrestling life and death with a psychotic maniac and getting clacked on the heid to fray the nerves.

Mark answers it. _HSBC_ , he mouths, melodramatic-like. _Aych ess bee cee_. The bank of foreign dignitaries, drug-fuelled Russian oligarchs, and, apparently, Mark Renton. He needs to change his fucking ringtone, Simon thinks.

There’s a long pause. “What do you mean,” Mark says, “Bounced?”

Simon turns his head.

Mark puts the phone on the sofa between them. “ _Please don’t be alarmed,”_ a tinny stranger says through the speaker. _“This often happens with small businesses. The notification is more of a formality than anything else.”_

“That can’t be right,” Mark answers, staring at Simon. In any other circumstance his expression, vague constipation with a soupçon of panic, would be invaluably comic. “There’s a hundred thou in there at least.”

_“It was withdrawn. Last Friday. Transferred to a Veronika Kovach?”_

She says it wrong, distorting the syllable into an overhard _tsch_ , like she’s chiding him. “Jesus fuck,” Mark says, and Simon punches the fucking phone.

 

 

 

Head down the toilet, face the colour of the bathroom floor, Simon says, “I cannae go to fuckin jail, Mark.”

“Haud your whisht,” Mark says back, leaning up in the doorframe. His mouth is puckered and unsympathetic. He was shite at holding back Simon’s sticky, brittle hair when they were twelve; the cheery midlife slant of a few decades hasn’t made it any more appealing. “It’s not gonna come to that.”

“Y’dinna ken _shite_ ,” Simon slurs. He begins retching half-heartedly again, brittle fingernails splintering against the porcelain.

“We need a lawyer,” Mark says.

 

 

 

“Who is Veronika Kovach?”

Simon fixes Diane with a hard, thin-eyed stare. “You tell me. She sat in your fuckin office.”

Diane shrugs. “She didn’t give me her name,” she says. “Do you have a copy of her legal identification? You were her employer, weren’t you?”

 “Get t’fuck,” Simon says, before Mark can shut him up. Mark elbows him, hard.

“We didn’t sign those papers,” Mark says, and Simon wonders whether he’s trying to flirt. Big doe eyes across the desk, _it wasnae me, honest. I, Mark Renton, can do no fuckin wrong_.

Diane’s eyes narrow. To Simon’s inestimable pleasure, she isn’t falling for it. “Would you pass a drugs test?”

They don’t answer. Diane raises an eyebrow, pencilled clawlike. “The way I see it,” she says, “You have two options. You either return the money in full, or you continue with the renovation out of your own pocket.” She’s fucking enjoying this, the cunt. “Or, I suppose, you tell the EU you lost the hundred grand they gave you to a pseudonymous Bulgarian prostitute.”

Simon clenches his jaw. “Where the fuck’m I meant to find one hundred thousand pound?”

“You could always go on the run,” Diane says, and Simon, fucking fool that he is, looks at Mark like it’s halfway an option.

 

 

 

 _Take it one day at a time_ , the lassie says. The addiction counsellor. The current reality-to-Simon interface. Simon’s the only one in the room over forty, though he flatters himself you can’t tell. Sat there with four-hundred-bob red loafers spiking priapically into the air, staring at an acne-speckled twentysomething in ill-fitting, mismatching trackies. He could be Spud, twenty years ago. He could be Simon’s son.

 _One day at a fuckin time_ , Simon thinks. At least he’s only likely to be fucked out of a hundred grand on one fuckin day of the week.

Renton’s there when Simon gets home. Bastard’s clearly found a key – Simon sure as fuck hasn’t given him one. “Where the fuck’ve you been?” Mark asks. His words are slurred. It’s barely afternoon; but then Spud always got that one bang on. What reason does a junkie have for minding the fuckin time?

“You know where I’ve been,” Simon says, shortly. “Don’t you mind one fuckin thing I say?”

“Oh,” Mark says, dazedly. “I forgot.”

Simon spots the needle on the sofa. The high had hit Mark before he’d worked out how to throw it away. “Let me guess,” Simon says, through an ugly sneer. “ _Jist this once_?”

Mark doesn’t answer. His eyes are lidded, glassy. Simon wants to tear his fucking throat out. _In my house_ , he thinks. _In my fuckin home._

“Some fuckin friend you are,” he spits instead. “Skag, Rentboy, fuckin _skag_. Y’couldnae last one fuckin month – ”

“What the fuck,” Mark says, “Has it got to do wi’you?”

Simon has no answer. Simon kicks the bedroom door off its hinges and sits on the floor and doesnae, doesnae, _doesnae_ snort up.

Later, when Mark is sober and no longer fugheaded, they play Mortal Kombat together on Simon’s pristine Sega.

 

 

 

 _Change your friends_ , the lassie says. Like it’s a matter of waking up in the morning and swapping your fucking shirt. Oh, aye, _Mark_ did it, sure. But Mark wasnae fuckin queer. Mark didn’t have the weight of being in love with his best and only friend.

“I’ve got this mate,” Simon says. He doesn’t often speak, and he never stays behind; and yet here they fucking are. The air tastes of sewage and damp because the toilets have flooded from the heavy rain. _Welcome to fuckin Edinburgh_ , Simon doesn’t say. “Living wi’me. He’s back oan the skag.”

Her small, smooth brow creases. She reminds Simon of a girl Tommy used to see, before Lizzy, the one Begbie used to call _that Paki bitch_. Except Begbie said it as one word, thatPakibitch. Simon hopes that doesn’t make him a racist. He doesnae think you can be a racist if you’re a poof with a half-black kiddie.

“He doesn’t sound like a good influence,” she says. _Got it in fuckin one_ , Simon thinks. “Maybe you don’t need him.”

Simon shakes his head. His blood’s in my fuckin veins, he wants to say. I’ll never be shot of him.

 

 

 

“I’ll remortgage the flat,” Simon says. “That’ll get us a few bob. Just to start with, mind.”

Mark, the doss cunt, looks surprised. “You own this place?” he asks.

Simon can’t take that as anything other than an insult. “It’s been twenty fuckin years, man,” he spits. “Did y’think I sat on my fuckin hands?”

“No,” Mark says, shrugging. He doesnae even have the decency to look contrite. “It’s just nice, is all.”

“Thanks,” Simon answers, tonelessly. Then, after a moment, he adds, “You’ll haftae get a job.” The skag won’t help with that, Simon thinks, but he daren’t fuckin mention it. “A goodin.”

“I know,” Mark says, pinches the bridge of his nose. “I should get some money through from Rita soon.”

Simon scowls at him. “Rita?” he asks, frowning. “Who the fuck’s Rita?”

The look Mark gives him is thick with incredulity. “My wife,” he answers, slow and oversteady, like he’s talking to a fucking child. Simon tries, and fails, not to let it bother him. The mythical Rita. He wonders what she’s like, whether she’s tall or short or has good tits.

“What kind of a fuckin name is Rita?” he asks, rhetorically, rolling the _r_. Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrita.

“My wife’s name,” Mark replies, because Mark always has to fucking answer, Mark never lets him have the last fucking word in anything. Ex-wife, Simon wants to say, but doesn’t. It’s petty, and he hasnae got the energy to row.

 

 

 

“Were you ever gonna tell me that you’re gay?” Mark asks, and Simon’s life, brief and joyless as it is, flashes before his fucking eyes.

He no longer has the patience or the temperament for denial. “Depends,” Simon says, with an intimately manufactured calm. “Are you going to be a prick about it?”

Mark shakes his head. “I lived in Amsterdam for twenty years,” he answers, smiling, like that fucking means anything at all. Like they haven’t got fascists and homophobes in Amsterdam.

Simon tilts up his chin. “So what is it? Am I wearing a fucking sign?”

Mark holds up a USB. That fucking bitch, Simon thinks, as he feels the blood rush out of his face. He knows the fuckin one. She told him she’d destroyed it; well. She’s stitched him up, right good and fucking proper, no mistake. “Is that what made you think of it?” Mark asks. Smug cunt, trying not to grin as he puts the stick down on the kitchen counter. “The strap-on.”

“Actually,” Simon says, evenly, “It was her idea. Besides, plenty of heterosexual men use strap-ons. The sex toy market is booming, and they comprise one of its most profitable items.”

“Aye, Simon,” Mark replies. “That’s true enough.” He moves closer, trapping Simon to clutch uselessly at the counter in his idiotic, overdecorated, overexpensive kitchen. “Mainly I was wondering whether, given due consideration to said sexual preference, your proclivities might align with me suckin you off?”

Simon swallows hard. He’s too fuckin close. Simon can’t bring himself to bolt. “You’re mad wae it.”

Mark shakes his head, puts his lips right against Simon’s jaw. “As a fuckin judge,” Mark says, and Simon can fuckin feel it, the murmur in his chest, the push and pull of the muscles in Mark’s mouth. There’s a big step between realising your best pal’s a flaming homo and knowing that he, Simon Williamson, has wanted to fuck, suck, be fucked and sucked by Mark Renton since he was a fuckin mealy-mouthed, sweaty-palmed runt.

He doesnae know, Simon realises. He’s just fuckin presuming, the arrogant cunt.

Simon digs his fingers into Mark’s hair, tugs back to bare his throat and meet his eye. “Is that why she left you? _Rita_. You shag her brother?”

Mark’s jaw visibly clenches. “She doesnae have a brother,” he answers, a little hoarsely. It isnae a no.

He lets go of Mark’s hair. This is a terrible fuckin idea, he thinks, and then he says it, just as Mark leans into him, hot zone of body heat pressed from tip to fuckin toe, closer than they’ve ever been afore. Gonnae no dae that, he wants to say, like a whiny fuckin child.

Mark smiles wolflike and does it anyway.

 

 

 

The couch is wet stickyhot under Simon’s back and Mark’s mouth is round his cock and he moans, alright, he fuckin moans like a fuckin hoor, like he doesnae know any fuckin better, like nobody’s ever sucked him off before. “You fuckin poof,” Mark surfaces to say, but his eyes are dark and he sure as fuck doesn’t have that hard-on for the baby Jesus.

Simon doesn’t have a funny answer. He pushes his fingers through Mark’s hair, too fuckin feart to look away. It’s blatantly fuckin obvious that Mark’s done this before, too, and Simon doesnae know what to fuckin think of that. Chasing Mark as ever like grabbing fistfuls of smoke.

Mark knows, too, whether from experience or intellect or just in his fuckin bones, to push Simon’s legs apart and press a firm finger at the base of his balls; and when he does Simon comes, alright, he fuckin comes, without warning or hesitation or even an inward fuckin breath, harder than he has since the turn of the fuckin century. Mark pitches himself backwards, swearing loudly, acting full well the pissy little bitch Simon truly fuckin kens. “Christ, Si, you nearly had my fuckin eye out, _fuck_.”

“Haud your fuckin whisht,” Simon replies, more of a wheeze than a matter of speech, spaced out on his back and feeling nonfunctional parts of his body slowly realign. “Jesus _fuck_.”

Mark has his head against Simon’s knee and his dick in his hand and the smile on his face is fuckin feral. Simon pushes his thumb against Mark’s bottom lip, watches enraptured and unknowing as Mark’s eyes roll back and his body falls foul of a heroinless ecstasy.

 

 

 

They sit next to each other on the sofa, sharing a fag. It’s a comfortable, marital silence.

“Nae more coke,” Mark says, eventually.

“Nae more skag,” Simon counters.

“Nae more gear,” Mark agrees.

Silence. The cigarette bobs its lazy way back and forth. “We could go and find him,” Mark says, in time. “Your son.”

“Aye,” Simon says. “Alright.”


End file.
